South Asian Sci-Fi From Partition To The Present

The British Indian Empire was partitioned into India and the two Pakistans in 1947 with further splits and splinters in the following decade. Sri Lanka became an independent nation in 1948, and Bangladesh was further separated from Pakistan in 1971. As a result, the rich Bengali, Urdu, and Tamil literary traditions, too, were split between countries ideologically and culturally disparate from each other. The Urdu literary scene in Lucknow diminished after Independence as Urdu fell out of favour as a literary language in India, and a more Sanskrit-ised Hindi gained prominence. On the eastern front, Calcutta continued to be the epicentre of the Bengali literary scene, while Dhaka’s literary scene developed independently from the 1970s onwards.

As Western science fiction entered its golden age in the early 20th century with the advent of popular pulp magazines like Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and William L. Crawford’s Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories, Bengali writers were heavily influenced by the speculative imagination of the genre. Every Bengali author since then has engaged with speculative elements in their work in some way at some point in their career — be it through hard SF and horror like Anish Deb, Adrish Bardhan, and Satyajit Ray, or literary works with speculative elements like Leela Majumdar, Premendra Mitra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, and Syed Mustafa Siraj.

Meanwhile, Tamil authors like Ramanichandran, Subha, Indra Soundar Rajan, Vidya Subramaniam, and Tamilvanan based in Madras (now Chennai); Urdu authors like Ibn-e-Safi, Mazhar Kaleem, M.A. Rahat, Mohiuddin Nawab, and Khalidah Asghar based in Lahore; and Bangladeshi authors like Humayun Ahmed based in Dhaka all engaged with speculative ideas and used SF tropes in their work.

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